1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an IC card, particularly a card used as a tag attached to a commodity for accumulating the degree of shoppers' interest in the commodity, and to a system for accumulating the degree of interest utilizing such card.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, tags have been attached to commodities for indicating the price, size, and material thereof and displayed at the store. Proposals have been made to employ IC cards as the tags and attach them to commodities for applications such as distribution management and the like so as to enhance the efficiency.
For retail stores actually selling commodities to shoppers, data related to the commodities drawing the shoppers' interest is extremely important for sales strategy. However, the conventional IC card tags described above do not accumulate the degree of shoppers' interest as objective data. Therefore, the degree of shoppers' interest is accumulated by a person in charge standing in front of a prescribed commodity and counting the number of times the shoppers touch the commodity. As a result, accumulating the degree of interest has been highly costly.
In addition, the conventional IC card described above is used only to indicate prescribed matters such as the price of the commodity, and therefore the card becomes useless to the shopper once he/she has purchased the commodity. Although the IC cards used as the tags can be collected by the retailer for reuse, good commodity service can be desirably provided if the use of the cards can be changed to a more valuable one to the purchaser when the commodity is sold.
In order to provide the IC card with a new use, the contents stored in the logic and the memory therein must be changed. However, the conventional IC cards described above do not have the arrangement that allows an easy change to be made at, for example, the sales area of the retail shop.